Sure, Windows 10 comes with its own search feature—the Cortana search that you access by poking the Windows button on your keyboard and typing in an app, file name, or anything else you feel like finding on your system (or learning more about).
We think the open-source app Wox is a great alternative, because it’s a speedy app launcher that’s also great for finding files and folders scattered across your system. More importantly, it makes it easy to quickly search the web by tapping just a few keys on your keyboard—whether you want a simple Google search or would rather use your own customized prefixes to load your query in a different search engine. Wox also supports third-party plugins, so you can do everything from find out your current IP address, to searching YouTube and Twitch streams, to controlling your Spotify playlist.
OneNote (free)
- Mac apps are generally available in one of two places: the Mac App Store or the developer’s website. Since Apple takes a 30% cut on any apps sold in the App Store a lot of developers are reluctant to use it, which makes things a little more complicated than on iOS.
- Lifehacker Pack for Mac: Student Edition. Thorin Klosowski. There are over 225,000 apps designed just for the iPad, which makes finding the most essential apps for the tablet a.
- Mac only: Freeware app WeatherDock is a lightweight application that provides one-click access to your local weather through the menubar or dock, updating the weather every 30 minutes.
Countdowns app make easy to remember about your essential dates without counting days in a calendar. Birthdays, holidays, new movie premiere, wedding anniversary, Superbowl finals, project deadline, current Pomodoro Technique time unit (called Pomodoro ), or new iPhone release date. Essential Mac Software Mac, Software PathFinder – is an award-winning, comprehensive file browser for Mac OS X, which combines the best of Apple’s Finder with powerful, integrated utilities and some innovative ways of accessing and manipulating your files. Lifehacker Pack for Windows: Our List of the Essential Windows Apps Herald is the next generation WordPress magazine theme, featuring a fully flexible header with 3 customizable areas and an easy-to-use module builder for unlimited layout combinations.
They provide a great list of free apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android that everyone should have. Using a great service called Ninite, they make all of these apps easily installable using a checklist and a single installer. As a former college tech-guy I can’t tell you how I wished this would have been around 10 years ago!
The best reason to put VLCon your Windows system is because it’s a thousand times better than Windows Media Player. It’s not bloated, it plays pretty much any media file you throw at it, and it does an excellent job cranking out as smooth a picture as you can get on systems that aren’t quite so powerful. In other words, if you’re trying to watch a high-definition video on a less-than-stellar laptop, for example, VLC has the best chance of giving you the highest quality experience you can get. It’s not a miracle worker, but its hardware decoding capabilities are formidable.
Adobe Bridge CC, digiKam, and Google Backup and Sync (free)
Yes, you can extract .ZIP files in Windows directly, and those are probably the kinds of archives you’ll encounter most. For everything else—including .RAR, .TAR, .ISO, .VDI, and .VHD, to name a few—the open-source app 7-Zip is a simple, lightweight way to extra files from, well, everything. Its user interface isn’t the prettiest, but that won’t matter to most people. If you’re bothered, check out PeaZip, a free alternative to 7-Zip that slaps a nicer GUI on top of 7-Zip’s core functionality.
Notepad++ (free)
So I am a big fan of Lifehacker, in short they are my Martha Stewart. I follow their posts and always find them interesting, some of their tips are helpful, some seem more trouble then they are worth. But one of the things that I keep coming back to is their Software Packs. They provide a great list of free apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android that everyone should have. Using a great service called Ninite, they make all of these apps easily installable using a checklist and a single installer. As a former college tech-guy I can’t tell you how I wished this would have been around 10 years ago! Setting up a machine would take half a day with all it’s installs and restarts and endless menus. Lifehacker and Ninite take that away and make it crazy-easy.
Today they just released the ‘Student Edition‘ of their software packs, which I think is great since most new computer sales these days are back-to-school sales. They make a big push to google docs, and I can’t blame them since google now lets you edit documents offline and sync them it makes a lot of sense to use that as your main office suite unless you need the (obsessive) controls that Microsoft Office gives you, in that case they opt for Libre Office (I use it- and love it!). But in the long run, keeping documents on the cloud just makes more sense.
their iOS includes things like Simplenote and Evernote but also budget app Mint to keep track of money and a free happy hour finder for after-school studies.
Lifehacker Essential Mac Apps Download
Again, had Evernote and dropbox existed when I was in school, I would have made deans list every semester. Then again, the happy-hour finder would have probably canceled that out…